Towards Data Sovereignty in Cyberspace

Abstract

From a national security perspective, cyberspace is a shared domain which requires a shared responsibility between stakeholders at national and global level. Many countries have taken concrete steps to safeguard and protect their sensitive national data in cyberspace against cyber threat such as for- eign intelligence services. Data sovereignty is of paramount importance to a nation-state such as Indonesia against the domination of foreign Internet service providers. Data sovereignty requirements can be viewed as reasonable efforts by nation-states to subject national sensitive data flows to and across national borders. Such data sovereignty requirements aim to safeguard and protect basic interests of nation-states in relation to data confidentiality, data integrity, and data availability. This study examines the Indonesian Government’s requirements for data sovereignty and proposes initial technical proposals for data sovereignty requirements such as an encryption, national email services, data center localisation, national routing of Internet traffic, and national backbone communications infrastructure. As a new domain, we believe that data sovereignty raises many questions for related future research.